“You haven’t lived my life.”

She, too, spoke almost with violence, and there was violence in her eyes.

“You haven’t lived for years in the midst of condemnation.  Your friend, Doctor Isaacson, secretly condemns me.  I know it.  And so I’m afraid of him.  I don’t pretend to have any real reason—­any reason that would commend itself to a man.  Women don’t need such reasons for their fears.”

“And yet you say that you like Isaacson!”

“So I do, in a way.  At least, I thought I did, till you told me you’d written to him to tell him about us and our life on the Nile.”

He could not help smiling.

“Oh!” he said, moving nearer to her.  “I shall never understand women.  What a reason for dislike of a man hundreds of miles away from us!”

“Hundreds of miles—­yes!  And if your letter brought him to us!  Suppose he took it into his head to run out and see for himself if what you wrote was true?”

“Ruby!  How wild you are in your suppositions!”

“They’re not so wild as you think.  Doctor Isaacson is just the man to do such a thing.”

“Well, even if he did—?”

“Do you want him to?” she interrupted.

He hesitated.

“You do want him to.”

She said it bitterly.

“And I thought I was enough!” she exclaimed.

“It isn’t that, Ruby—­it isn’t that at all.  But I confess that I should like Isaacson to see for himself how happy we are together.”

“Did you say that in your letter?”

“No, not a word of it.  But I did think it when I was writing.  Wasn’t it a natural thought?  Isaacson was almost my confidant—­not quite, for nobody was quite—­about my feelings and intentions towards you before our marriage.”

“And if he could have prevented the marriage, he would have prevented it.”

“And because of that, if it’s true, you wouldn’t like him to see us happy together?”

“I don’t want him here.  I don’t want any one.  I feel as if he might try to separate us, even now.”

“He might try till the Day of Judgment without succeeding.  But you are not quite fair to him.”

“And he would never be fair to me.  There’s the after-glow coming at last.”

They watched it in silence giving magic to the western hills and to the cloudless sky in the west.  It was suggestive of peace and of remoteness, suggestive of things clarified, purged, made very wonderfully pure, but not coldly pure.  When it died away into the breast of the softly advancing night, Nigel felt as if it had purged him of all confusion of thought and feeling, as if it had set him quite straight with himself.

“That makes me feel as if I understood everything just for a moment,” he said.  “Ruby, don’t let us get into any difficulties, make any difficulties for ourselves out here.  We are having such a chance for peace, aren’t we?  We should be worse than mad if we didn’t take it, I think.  But we will take it.  I understand that your life has made you suspicious of people.  I believe I understand your fears a little, too.  But they are groundless as far as I am concerned.  Nobody on earth could ever come between you and me.  Only one person could ever break our union.”